Turns out Blackstone didn't have a lesson to learn from Taylor Swift

Blackstone bosses are not in Taylor Swift's league. Photo: Invision

It's astonishing that you can be one of the most successful businesses in the world, employing some of the brightest people on the planet, earning fortunes for yourselves and your investors, and yet so tone deaf.

When it comes to empathy, you’re sadly lacking – so much so that an attempt to show your human side, to relate to ordinary folk, backfires spectacularly, only serving to highlight that you’re even more out of touch than anyone imagined.

Even then, you just don’t get it, hailing the video you produced as a huge success. True, it’s gone viral but clearly you don’t realise that many of those 600k instant hits you’re touting were actually viewers watching from behind their fingers, so unbelievably shocked were they.

That’s the conclusion to be drawn from Blackstone’s five-minute, Taylor Swift-inspired, seasonal greetings tape. It’s awful.

So much so that you have to wonder what is in the heads of its makers, what possessed them to include lines such as “we buy assets and make 'em better” and “great returns for institutions and private wealth solutions”.

Go on tour like Taylor Swift but a Blackstone version? I love it

Stephen Schwarzman,
Blackstone chief executive

Blackstone likes its employees to possess high IQs, but seemingly, EQs don’t count. Being intelligent is what matters. Being empathetic – well, that is too namby-pamby, not something that matters in the ascent to corporate riches.

The video opens with the president of the giant US private equity firm, Jon Gray, telling the board they should “go on tour like Taylor”. What follows is Blackstone’s super-rich asset managers dancing and lip-synching.

Senior figures in the company star, including chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, chief finance officer Michael Chae and global head of corporate affairs Christine Anderson.

When Gray says the firm should go on a similar tour to Swift’s record-breaker, to raise $1 billion as she has done, a colleague says: “Jon, we managed to raise a trillion dollars professionally explaining our disciplined and thematic approach to investing.” Boom, boom. Truly, he did say that.

Chief executive of Blackstone Stephen Schwarzman. Reuters

They run it by chief executive Schwarzman, who says: “Go on tour like Taylor Swift but a Blackstone version? I love it!” He’s speaking, surrounded by dozens of copies of his own memoir.

All credit to him, apparently for a smattering of self-deprecation, although is there any surprise that his book should languish on the shelves? Important, self-important, as he is, Schwarzman is no best-selling influencer.

Neither is he, nor anyone at Blackstone, Taylor Swift. She is so successful, and yes, she makes tonnes of money, because Swift connects. She wins hearts with her lyrics, her music and the emotion she conveys. Swift may be netting vast sums, but that’s because her audience relates to her. There is no chance of her singing about having raised a trillion dollars.

That, too, underlines how Blackstone really thinks – that Swift’s tour has earned a billion, but at Blackstone, they’re far superior, dealing in trillions not billions. All that attention on Taylor Swift? We’re the real superstars. You suspect the absence of popular adulation of the sort afforded to Swift cuts deep.

It’s possible to say the video is a “bit of fun”, a faceless investment behemoth stressing they’re “real”. That would be easier to justify if so much thought and cost had not gone into the production. This isn’t some light-hearted caper with an iPhone. It’s a slickly produced, carefully choreographed, tightly scripted number.

The reel took hours to prepare. Costumes had to be sourced, graphics drawn, executive diaries cleared. There were lines to be learnt. Presumably, each cameo required more than one take.

Surrounded by memoirs in a corporate setting, a stark reminder of the gap between executive self-perception and public empathy. Bloomberg

All to create a skit that resulted in the comments section on the YouTube link being closed down soon after it aired, such was the opprobrium.

If the aim was to produce a piece of private merriment for clients and staff, that may not have been too bad. But that was not the intention, as the posting on YouTube illustrated.

It was meant for public consumption, this from a corporation still remembered in the UK for the Southern Cross care home collapse. Southern Cross was the biggest care home chain in the country when it went down in 2012 with 31,000 vulnerable residents. Blackstone had been its owner, making hundreds of millions in profits, but exited ahead of the demise.

In the US, Blackstone is associated with the controversial eviction of student, affordable-housing and elderly tenants in thousands of rental units it owns.

Against this backdrop, singing along with Gray (£376 million last year in pay and dividends), Schwarzman (a record-breaking £1 billion) et al is simply not joyous.

The mockumentary should not have got off first base. Apparently, we’re told Gray went to a Swift concert with his daughters (in the best seats, presumably) when the idea came to him. That’s where it ought to have stayed.

Firms like Blackstone can do little right. Better not to tempt fate, then.

Yes, in the overall scheme of things it was harmless. But it did them no good.

It was irony. Here they should have heeded a valuable lesson. In 2009, Lloyd Blankfein, the then-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, decided to open the investment bank’s doors to a journalist from The Sunday Times. This, shortly after Goldman had been vilified in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”

The Sunday Times was to be the bank’s PR fightback. The session went well. The writer got to meet numerous Goldman employees and ask them anything he wanted. On the way out, as they stood by the lifts, Blankfein said he hoped the paper could see he was “just a banker, doing God’s work”.

It was intended as a throwaway remark, in jest. Instead, Blankfein appeared everywhere, not only in The Sunday Times, proclaiming that “bankers do God’s work”.

Next year’s Blackstone offering is awaited with interest. What’s the betting they do something similar? After all, the 2023 edition was a triumph. Seriously.